Cannes turns up the heat

Fahrenheit 9/11 may have won the top prize, but there were many more gems in this year's competition, writes Stephanie Bunbury in Cannes.

Inevitably, said Michael Moore, his explosive win at the Cannes Film Festival at the weekend with Fahrenheit 9/11, a sustained tirade against the Bush presidency, would be interpreted as political. Which was not what he wanted, as he was and always had been a member of the cinephile party.

He loved to go to the cinema so much, he said, he went three or four times a week. The Moore family even eschews DVDs. "I like to sit there in the dark and see (a film) as it was intended to be seen," he said. "Love it or hate it." He smiled. How could he have won, he said later, when there had been so many wonderful films screening all week?

It was a good question. Of course the jury's decision in Cannes was political: Fahrenheit 9/11 was certainly entertaining, but not half so inventive or artfully constructed as Moore's last film, Bowling for Columbine.

On the other hand, the jury's decision is always political in some way. Past Palme d'Ors have rewarded careers or confirmed certain directors as festival favourites: everyone expected Wong Kar-Wei's 2046 to win this year's Palme for those reasons.

Sometimes the prizes strike an unembarrassed blow for a particular kind of cinema, as last year's Palme for Gus Van Sant's Elephant did for low-cost indies. No decision is pure, whatever that could mean. So why should this year's jury miss the opportunity to cock a snoot at President George Bush and the Disney corporation?

So much elation over Moore's Palme, however, could obscure the fact that this year's Cannes Film Festival, after the nadir of last year's lacklustre selection, was one of the most challenging and satisfying for years. It was also more broadly international, the strength of its Asian showing being reflected in the jury's other awards.

Korean director Park Chan-wook was widely regarded as a Palme contender for Old Boy, a kind of manga-meets-Macbeth revenge drama of such hectic bloodiness that you emerged, as one distributor observed, feeling as if your head had been in a vice. In the event, he won the Grand Prix - confusingly, the festival's second prize.

Choi Min-sik's performance as Oh Dae-soo, a man who finds himself imprisoned for 15 years without knowing why, was also expected to win the award for best actor. With his shaggy hair and intense gaze, Choi embodied the film's mix of comic exaggeration and ominous tragedy with a concentration that becomes even more remarkable in retrospect, when the stomach-churning effect of watching him eat a live octopus wears off.

Park must have been asked hundreds of times about the octopus scene in the past 12 days, but he never seemed to tire of talking about it. It took four takes to get right, he said. "The first three octopuses were very mushy and died as soon as (I) started eating them," he said with, I suspect, some relish. "The fourth one was very energetic and strong, waving its tentacles around and I said 'I'm happy to see you'. I asked it to behave like a real rebel and that's exactly what it did." Actually, he seems to be adding a little to this story each time he tells it.

We were wrong about Choi, though. He lost out on acting honours to Yagira Yuya, the 14-year-old star of Kore-Eda Hirokazu's moving film about a family of abandoned children, Nobody Knows.

Hirokazu's sleepy pacing is flawless, evoking the langueurs of the children's lives as they eke out food and money and wait for something to happen. Hirokazu himself said frankly that he was at first surprised that, of all the awards, his film should claim this one. "But then I thought it was well-deserved. We worked for a whole year and you can see how the children developed over that time."

The director's prize, meanwhile, went to French director Tony Gatlif, whose free-form, virtually unscripted films seem to resist the idea that they are directed at all. Exils, a fictionalised account of his own return to the land of his birth, Algeria, is his usual mix of music, abandoned dancing, sensuality and emotional extremity, largely performed by non-professionals. Marching determinedly to his own drum, he fetishises freedom. His trip to Algeria, he said, showed him that he truly had no home. "I am a nomad," he said to the press, "and I lay claim to that!"

Maggie Cheung, the Hong Kong star known to Australian audiences for her work with Wong Kar-Wei, was a worthy winner of the best actress award in a festival with few meaty female roles. Working with Oliver Assayas, her former partner, she takes the part of a junkie whose child is awarded to his grandparents and who struggles to get, in the single word of the film's title, Clean. It is a compassionate film about a woman pushed to the margins of her world.

"It was difficult to play Emily," said Cheung. "Not in a technical sense, but because it was painful to be her." They had decided, she said, that she should simply be, rather than try to "play" the character; her Emily was raw but was also allowed to be depressed and flat, the antithesis of a capital-P performance. "I think other directors might think of me to play a junkie; why not?" she said. "But only Oliver would trust me to that extent, to play Emily as I wanted to do."

Agnes Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri won the scriptwriting award for Look at Me, which extends the story of a rather plain girl who wants to be a star to include a whole gallery of characters who would like to be other than they are: younger, more talented, more loved or simply someone else. It was the third prize for a French film, but there was no question of bias: this was one of the most popular films of the festival.

In another decision that might be read as political, pro-French or something else, depending on your bent, the Camera d'Or for a first film went to a French-Israeli co-production, Or, by Keren Yedaya, about the lives of prostitutes in the occupied territories. "I wanted to make a film that might change something, even in a small way," Yedaya said quietly after the awards. "Something that dealt with people outside society, the people you don't see or don't want to see."

She used her moment on stage to argue against Israel's current campaign in the territories, something she knew would bring a hostile response from some Israeli critics. But this was the first time Israel had won a prize at Cannes, she said, so she had to take her chance. "There are a lot of people in Israel working hard against occupation and one has to state this, because it's a fact of life, it's actually true. They would like me to say pretty things, but I can't."

The real surprise among the winners was a film from Thailand, which won one of two jury prizes: Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Tropical Malady, a story of magic and monstrosity that uses the exoticism of the Thai jungle as the Grimms once used the Black Forest.

As one of many festival films about homosexual love, Tropical Malady goes against the Thai grain. "People in Thailand will either hate it or love it," said the director. "But my goal is to present my vision." The other jury prize went to Irma P. Hall for her performance as the crime-foiling old dear in the Coen brothers' otherwise dismal remake of The Ladykillers.

In the Un Certain Regard section, where Australian director Cate Shortland's Somersault was competing, the top prize went to a universally admired film from Senegal, Moolaade by Ousmane Sembene, which tells the story of a village woman who gives girls asylum from circumcision.

A prize for originality in Un Certain Regard, and the Fipresci critics association's prize for the section, went to Whisky, a film from Uruguay about the mutually dependent relationship of two ageing workers in a sock factory made by a new young director, Juan-Pablo Rebella. Fipresci gave its award for a main competition film to - yes, indeed - Michael Moore for Fahrenheit 9/11. Was that a political decision? Is it a conspiracy? Let's hope so.